other form of life as the final pages were composed, pathetically clinging to the relationship her wealth had bought? Helena wondered if she had bothered to go to bed since she had not bothered with food. She might have died of exhaustion as well as of starvation. She might have lost track of day and night, afraid to leave the study in case the long task should by some awful mischance be lost when the end was so very close. She imagined her mother struggling with sleep, weak in her body, the clarity of her bold handwriting now the most important fragment of her existence. She imagined her blinking away a sudden dizziness, and then moving in the room, one hand still on the desk to balance her progress, another reaching out into the gloom. She imagined her dead, lying on the unclean carpet.
On the foolscap pages there were underlined words, printed in capital letters:
She did not sleep in the house. Each evening she returned to her two-room flat near Shepherd’s Bush, where she turned the television on immediately to drive the house out of her thoughts. She sat in front of the bustling little screen with a glass of whisky and water, hoping that it, too, would help to cloud the images of the day. She longed to be back in her noisy kitchens, surrounded by different kinds of food. Sometimes, when she’d had a second and a third glass of whisky, the catalogue of the food which had become her life reminded her in a wry way of the catalogue of words in the study, one so esoteric, one so down-to-earth. Toad-in-the-hole, cabinet pudding, plaice and chips, French onion soup, trifle, jelly surprise.
One morning she arrived at the house with a cardboard carton into which she packed the foolscap pages. She carried it upstairs and placed it in a corner of the bedroom that had been her parents’, with a note to the effect that it should not be taken away by the firm she had employed to take everything else. The books in the study would go, of course. In her small flat she could not possibly store them, and since they were of no possible interest to her what was the point?
Mrs Archingford kept ringing the doorbell, to ask if she would like a cup of tea or if she could help with anything. Mrs Archingford was, not unnaturally after the years that had gone by, curious. She told Helena that at Number 10 the elderly couple’s son had moved in, to look after them in their now extreme old age. Birds flew about the rooms, so Mrs Archingford reported; the son was odd in the extreme.
‘I dare say you’ll be relieved to turn your back on the house?’ she probed. ‘No place for a young person, I shouldn’t wonder?’
‘Well, I don’t want to live here, certainly.’
‘My dear, however could you?’
Mrs Archirigford’s tone implied a most distressful childhood. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear, her tone suggested, that Helena had been beaten and locked in cupboards, just to teach her. ‘Most severe, your mother was, I always thought.’
‘It was her way.’
‘Forgive a nosy neighbour, dear, but your mother didn’t look happy. Her own worst enemy, as I said one time to the gas man. “Be brisk about it,” she ordered him, really sharply, you know, when the poor fellow came to read the meter. Oh, years ago it must have been, but I often remember it. Imagine that said to a meter man, when all the time he has to go careful in case of errors! And of course if he had made an error she’d be the first –’
‘Actually, my mother wouldn’t have noticed.’
‘Why don’t you slip in for a Nescafe and a Danish, eh? Smells like a morgue this hall does – oh, there, what a clumsy I am! Now, take that as unsaid, dear!’
Helena replied that it was quite all right, as indeed it was, Mrs Archingford pressed her invitation.
‘What about a warming cup, though? D’you know, I’ve never in all my days been inside this house? Not that I expected to, I mean why should I? But really it’s interesting to see it.’
Mrs Archingford poked a finger into the dust on the hallstand, and as she did so the doorbell rang. Women from the charitable organization had come for the clothes, so Helena was saved from having to continue the conversation about Nescafe and Danish pastries. That morning, too, a man arrived to estimate the value of the house and its contents so that death duties might be calculated. Then a man who was to purchase the contents came. He looked them over and suggested a figure far below that of the death duties man, but he pointed out that he was offering a full removal service, that in some unexplained way Helena was saving a fortune. She didn’t argue. In the afternoon Mrs Archingford rang the bell again to say the estate agents Helena had chosen were not the best ones, so the woman in the Corner Shop had told her when she’d happened to allude to the matter while buying smoked ham. But Helena replied that the choice had been made.
A few days later she watched the furniture being lifted away, the books and ornaments in tea-chests, the crockery and saucepans and cutlery, even the gas cooker and the refrigerator. When everything was gone she walked about the empty rooms. Why had she not asked the sandy-haired man who had come? Why had she not made tea for him and persuaded him to tell her anything at all? Through a blur of mistiness she saw her mother as a child, playing with her brother in the garden he had mentioned. Helena stood in the centre of the room that had been her mother’s bedroom and it seemed to her then that there were other children in the garden also, and voices faintly echoing. Trees and shrubs defined themselves; a house had lawns in front of it. ‘Come on!’ the children good-naturedly cried, but her mother didn’t want to. Her mother hated playing. She hated having to laugh and run about. She hated being exposed to a jolliness that made her feel afraid. She wanted peace, and the serious silence of her room, but they always came in search of her and they always found her. Laughing and shouting, they dragged her into their games, not understanding that she felt afraid. She stammered and her face went white, but still they did not notice. Nobody listened when she tried to explain, nobody bothered.
These shadows filled her mother’s bedroom. Helena knew that the playing children were a figment without reality, yet some instinct informed her that such shadows had been her mother’s torment, that their dreaded world had accompanied her even after she had hidden from them in a suburban house where the intolerable laughter was not allowed. Companions too ordinary to comprehend her mother’s different nature had left her afraid of ordinariness, and fear was what she had passed on to an ordinary daughter. Helena knew she would never marry; as long as she lived she would be afraid to bring a child into the world, and reflecting on that now she could feel within her the bitterness that had been her mother’s, and even the vengeful urge to destroy that had been hers also.
Curtains had been taken down, light-shades removed. Huge patches glared from ancient wallpaper where furniture had stood or pictures hung. The bare boards echoed with Helena’s footsteps. She bolted what it was
